Monday, March 16, 2015

Picking the perfect title for your
film or any creative work for that matter, can be incredibly tricky.
A bland title will nearly guarantee your potential audience to take a
pass. A misleading title, much like reaching for what you think is a
hush puppy but instead is a cold, gross battered ball of corn, will
only lead to disgust and highly irritate. (Seriously, why would
someone do that? Cruelty has many, many forms, dear reader.) But a
perfect title will pique your interest and give you a hint of what
you are to expect from the work in question. Case in point, Bob
Chinn's breezy 1979 film, “Hot & Saucy Pizza Girls.” There
are, in fact, girls that are hot, saucy and work in a pizza joint in
this film. But the “Pizza Girls” is more than just a food-sex pun
of a film. Sort of. Anyways, let's begin!

The movie starts with a classic lit-up
sign, promoting “Country Girl Pizza. We Deliver.” Cut to inside
the rustic looking pizzeria where the restaurant's owner, John (John
“The King” Holmes) is interviewing a potential new delivery girl,
Ann Chovy (Desiree Cousteau.) The naive Southern Belle ends up wooing
her new boss over with some physical charms and she gets to join the
gang of ultra-lovely and highly sassy delivery girls, including Gino
(Candida Royalle), Shakey (Laurien Dominique) and Celeste (Christine
de Shaffer). If the film had been made a bit later and in a different
region, we would also undoubtedly have Totino, Red Baron and Tony.

The girls start to make their
deliveries for the day, with the customers ranging from one intensely
enthusiastic hayseed (the always reliable Richard Pacheco) to a bored
and lonely housewife (Vicky Lindsay). Meanwhile, a slight and shifty
man in black is blatantly trying to keep tabs on the pizza girls'
comings and goings. Turns out this gentleman, aptly named Inspector
Blackie (John Seeman), is a detective determined to bust Country Girl
Pizza for being a front for prostitution. While we're on the topic,
the phrase,“pizza brothel”, might be one of the best to have
emerged out of the valley of language in a long time. Say it out
loud. Let it roll off the tip of your tongue. Now think about the
connotations. Nice, isn't it?

Anyways, further intrigue emerges as
the cowpoke from earlier is buddies with a group of fried chicken
enthusiasts led by Henry (Paul Thomas), who also has used the
ebullient services of the pizza girls. Turns out, they don't cotton
too well to the world of pizza encroaching on their great true love
of fried chicken. Never has a hatred of pizza fueled such diabolical
tomfoolery. The intrigue gets even weirder when the boys choose to
employ the services of the San Francisco “Night Chicken.”
Apparently this never seen but heard on screen fowl-tool-of-villainy
is six feet tall and has a penchant for rape. (As all overgrown night
chickens do!)

After one of the girls gets violated,
John immediately knows it is the Night Chicken. We then find out from
him that, “We have been after this chicken for ten years!” I
guess local police weren't too worried about giant poultry sexually
assaulting various people? Anyways, with the aid of his coworker and
sidekick Bob (director Bob Chinn), John and company are determined to
crack down on this truly foul fowl. Will the gang succeed or lose out
to perverse man-birds and fried chicken enthusiasts? What about
Inspector Blackie and the wholly guile-less Ann? For that and more,
you'll just have to grab some hopefully non-carcinogen riddled
popcorn and watch for yourselves!

“Hot & Saucy Pizza Girls” is an
amazingly silly film but the best kind, since it knows it's
ridiculous and completely revels in it. It is truly a fun, airy
little film that has all the appeal of a naughty and light comic
book. The fact that you have a subplot about women getting violated
by a monstrous chicken and yet, the whole still plays very sunshine
with no dark clouds, is nothing short of amazing. It helped,
undoubtedly, having Bob Chinn at the helm. Chinn is most famous for
directing a number of the “Johnny Wadd” films, which also brought
“Pizza Girls” male star, John Holmes, to major fame and
notoriety. The two men had a great rapport with each other and that
definitely shows here, with Holmes being incredibly likable and quite
funny as the manager of Country Girl Pizza. (Though it is Bob who
gets the great line, “I just don't want to get fucked by no
chicken!”) Speaking of funny, Richard Pacheco also merits a kudos
for his eight-miles-outside-of-Hee-Haw cornpone bumpkin who sings
“Get Along Little Doggie” mid-coitus. Eternally underrated John Seeman is funny and physically adept as the mysterious yet wondrously nerdy Inspector Blackie.

The titular pizza girls are all
supremely lovely and likable, including such classic adult legends
like Desiree Cousteau (“Pretty Peaches”) and Candida Royalle, as
well as the equally wonderful but more on the cult side starlets
Laurien Dominique and Christine de Shaffer (who was great as lunatic
Babsy in Johnny Legend's mind-blowing “Young & Nasty Teenage Cruisers.”) Here they get to be sassy, gorgeous and funny, with
Royalle and de Shaffer both carrying off a very strong,
take-no-prisoners pizza delivering style. Cousteau is her usual
charming Betty Boop by way of small town Southern USA self and
looking every inch a 1970's version of a Vargas girl.

The pseudo-twang-country music is
fittingly goony, right down to it being listed as “Lousy Music,”
that is credited to “Lon Jon.” (Surely, his real name.) The film
is well shot, with all of the colors popping in a pastel yet vibrant
type of way. Another stellar remastering job courtesy of the skilled
folks at Vinegar Syndrome does not hurt either. Speaking of the DVD
release, there's also a short but very informative interview with
noted adult film director and “Pizza Girls” producer, Damon
Christian.

“Hot & Saucy Pizza Girls” may
not reinvent any cinematic wheel or even the wheel spokes themselves,
but it is a very cute, dementedly whimsical movie that features some
good comedic performances and is the only film to date that has
combined the notion of a pizza brothel with a menacing six foot
chicken/creeper. That alone spells it out better than any paint by
numbers nature velvet scene available at your nearest family oriented
hobby store.